Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 695

No Internet Blues

May 9, 2016 by Belghast

Vault of Glass

I am on vacation the next two days, so as a result you are getting a post a bit later than normal. I had every intent of getting up like normal, but the world was rainy…and the bed was warm, and the room nice and dark so I just kept sleeping. I got up long enough to make my wife some coffee and then went right back to bed, and while I thought I wasn’t really asleep I apparently missed her departure. I largely survived the moms day festivities and other than getting choked up due to some backwater yokel burning wet leaves… thing went pretty smoothly. So much so that I thought we would be back home at a decent hour last night. My Destiny clan does a Sunday night Retro raid trip through Vault of Glass, and I am in desperate need of an Aetheon kill so that I can finish my No Time To Explain exotic pulse rifle quest. Generally speaking Sunday is television night in our household, but given that te rest of the day was kinda messed up I decided to take a pass and instead signed up for the raid. It was going to be awesome to finally have that quest out of my log.

When we got home from an extended dinner/conversation with my parents, I went upstairs and sat down at my computer. I brought up a single website… the one that allows me to sign up for a clan event. When I then turned around and hit the Bungie website to transfer some items I got a no internet connection error in Chrome. Sure enough I was setting the caution light symbol on my ethernet, and it was around this point that I noticed the cable modem disconnected. I fiddled a few times to try and get it reconnected, and then hollered down at my wife to check the cable. Sure enough the television part of the equation was out too. The biggest frustration is that there was an error messaging showing up on the television with a phone number, but when we called that number and waded their their annoying menu of options, we finally received an answering message stating that the office was closed. At this point it is 8:30, and the raid starts at 9 pm… so a mild bit of panic is setting in but there isn’t much I can actually do about it.

Life Without Internet

Thankfully our mobile phones were working because my wife managed to find a different tech support number, and we called that. Once again we had to wade through a frustrating sequence of message prompts. We finally get to someone and sure enough there is a major outage in our area, one that is not planned to be resolved until 10:06 so an hour after the start of the raid. I manage to fiddle with the mobile app for the clan and de-register from the event, and sit there resigned to my fate. The problem with our modern connected society is that most of the things that I like to do… simply don’t function without internet. Thankfully I had managed to log into the PS4 before the internet went out and it seemed that Ratchet and Clank didn’t care about having connectivity. I ended up playing that for a bit until at some point looked to the side and the blue lights were back on our cable modem. My Wife verified that in fact we did have cable television back as well, and things seemed pretty peachy. It seems like they managed to fix the issue by 9:30 instead of 10 something whcih was awesome, but unfortunately the Vault of Glass raid didn’t actually make.

Instead we ended up watching the rebroadcast of Fear the Walking Dead, and then going to bed a it later than we normally do. Losing internet is this strange roller coaster of emotions which I guess in some way troubles me that this one thing is that important. We found out that apparently there was a lightning strike that took out a connection point for both the power and cable, and that a large swath of my town was out of power. I remember the thought going through my head of “Whats the use in having power if we don’t have internet” which when I thought it kinda jarred me. I guess it was a weird conclusion to what was ultimately a really strange weekend. It wasn’t necessarily a bad strange, just way busier than we are used to. On a positive note my “flower children” seem to still be happy and we have failed to kill them off in the week we have had them. They require way more water than I had originally thought which has me watering both morning and evening to keep them looking healthy. The “Sunpatiens” especially seem to need a thorough soaking both times to make them nice and happy, which was not something I was expecting. I had always been told that over watering was just as bad as not watering at all. However it seems like whatever we ended up with combined with Oklahoma temperatures really need that water. Hopefully tomorrow I will be back to normal gaming style posts, but this is all I really had for today.

Mothers Day Prep

May 8, 2016 by Belghast

Searching for Thing

Yesterday was a strange day, in that we got up and ate breakfast like normal… but upon finishing my wife went off to work. She spent the entire day either working in her room or later proctoring a mock AP exam. This meant that I was largely left to fend for myself, which is admittedly a happy place for me. I grew up an only child, and instead of going places I didn’t want to I often begged to stay home alone. So even today I am pretty happy just chilling by myself for long periods of time. Yesterday however there was a mission, and that was to acquire a Mothers Day gift for my mother in law. Now early in the season we had figured out what we were going to get her, but did not honestly have a great place to store it. So yesterday after eating breakfast and showering I got out and cleaned my vehicle so that I could set down the seats and haul said item.

The only gotcha was that when I got to the store, the huge stack of said item that was there several times during this season… somehow vanished. I spent awhile poking around in the store and looking for the item, and even harassed several employees that lead me through a sequence of departments I had already checked. So I sent the obligatory “We Might be Screwed” text to my wife and as it was getting to be lunch time I figured I would get some take out and call various stores to see if anyone had some. I am purposefully being vague here, because while I know that my mother in law doesn’t read my blog… it still feels weird to talk about a gift I have yet to deliver. My brilliant wife suggested that I go onto the stores website to see if it shows any in stock near by, which is great because I hate making phone calls. The funny thing is… the store in question shows that they have 20 available and in stock at my local store. Aka the store I just went to that told me they didn’t even know what I was looking for.

Inventory Black Hole

On a whim I figured it was worth a shot… the worst thing that would happen is that they would have to refund the purchase. So I added two of the item I was looking for into my shopping cart on the website… somehow expecting at any moment for the site to come to its senses and realize that the store didn’t have the product. I added in my credit card information and hit purchase, verifying that it was in fact available for pick up that day before finalizing the order. I got a confirmation email saying that the store would call me when the item was ready for pickup. Then I began waiting… and in my boredom, anxiety and frustration I noticed that Audacity was open in the background. Maybe this is a bad thing for me to have open in the background because I apparently recorded this. Firstly I am horribly sorry for the thing you are about to listen to… but it made me giggle so I decided to share it.

Sure enough about an hour and a half later I get the phone call from the store telling me that they have two ready for pick up, and asking when I will be there. I hop in the my vehicle and head straight there, where they have two of said item loaded on a flat bed trailer thingy ready to go. I have to show my ID and sign a piece of paperwork and almost too good to be true I am walking out to the parking lot with said items. Funny story… while moving the items on the cart began to jostle and next thing I notice they are sliding off the back end of the cart. This is the point at which I learn about physics and how if you have an item that naturally moves on its own… you apparently should orient it in such a way as to NOT cause that movement to happen. Thankfully nothing was damaged and I got them loaded into the back of my vehicle, and even had a nice person who really wanted my flatbed cart so I didn’t have to push that back up to the store.

Crusadering

What was left of the day I spent playing Diablo 3 and pushing my way towards some of the conquest achievements. I was happy that I didn’t have to end up running all over hells have acre yesterday trying to find the thing on short notice. I still feel like having my Mothers gift drop shipped more than a week ahead of time was the way to go, but that doesn’t always work out. Yesterday was honestly oddly stressful because the moment my wife got home from work, we had to get right back on the road and head to dinner. We do this once a month dinner thing with her siblings, and because reasons… it somehow got shifted from Friday night to Saturday night. Which meant we had to watch the clock and make sure we were out of the restaurant in time for us to drive the roughly hour home so I could be here for the podcast.

Today we are doing something similar, with the moment my wife gets out of church we are heading to her mothers to deliver the gift, and then that afternoon seeing my mother. I am actually super glad that I have both Monday and Tuesday off because otherwise this would have been a crazy weekend. This is also probably one of the strangest posts I have made in awhile, because it is like 99% real life and 1% gaming. Hopefully you all will take it in stride because it is what happened to come out once my fingers started moving this morning.

Bag Bloat

May 7, 2016 by Belghast

Overflowing

Last night I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about MMORPGs and she mentioned that she had logged into a game recently and had a visceral reaction. Upon logging in she saw what a state of disarray her bags were, and when she tried to go to the bank to simply just stuff it all in there… was confronted with the same thing going on there. She ultimately just logged out and went on to play something else. This exact sequence has happened to me time and time again and is the biggest obstacle for me playing certain games. A big game on that list is Rift. Right now every single corner of my bank is full, and most of my bags as well. Every so often I have the desire to play the game, but when I log in and see a few hours worth of sorting ahead of me to get my bags into a state where I can feel comfortable playing… I just log back out frustrated. In my case the bags are full of non-critical items like dimension stuff and crafting materials… but it isn’t stuff I am willing to part with either. So instead of playing the game like I originally wanted, I just lament how I don’t have a good solution to fix the problem.

I am in a similar place right now with World of Warcraft. My bags, bank, and void storage are completely full with cosmetic gear for transmogrification. I know that with Legion they are putting in a system that will allow me to save the graphic and not have to keep the item. However in the mean time I am stuck juggling all of this loot with no real end in sight. Sure I could get marginally larger bags, but that would only buy me a few slots worth of reprieve rather than being a permanent solution. So with World of Warcraft, I honestly doubt I will be seriously playing that game until the pre-legion patch launches… that hopefully gives us the transmog solution. This is a situation I am very familiar with because I have struggled with it for years in Everquest II, but in that case it is simply because the inventory maintenance systems they have are pretty horrible and I can’t remember what half of the items I have looted actually do. I wish games would have tool tips that clearly identified what an item is used for, because in the past I have accidentally sold that one important item that I could never get back to complete a quest, and I am in constant paralysis when it comes to potentially doing the same thing again.

Bulk Storage

Since Rift is the king of adding in new and interesting systems to solve problems. I would like to humbly suggest two more be added to the pile. Basically for me personally I need bulk storage for Dimension items and Crafting materials. So what I propose is an account wide bulk storage system. For the dimensions some sort of toolbox that you can dump items into and then place them directly from a panel that collects and shows you how many of each item you have. In order to remove items from the economy and not allow players to just horde items that they might later sell, I would suggest that adding a dimension item binds it to you so that it can only be used in dimensions attached to your account. There would probably need to be a limit to the number of a single item you are storing, but in theory it just goes into the void and then is summoned inside of your dimension via the toolbox panel. This solves a bunch of problems other than storage, namely that the toolbox interface would allow you to see just what you had to place, and even more so what you were lacking so you could go off and acquire those items in particular. Wildstar has a system very similar to this, and it works amazingly well. Having something in place similar would allow me at least to tame my bag bloat.

From the crafting side of the equation I suggest a similar system. When you dump your crafting materials into bulk storage they again go into the void and are only extracted through crafting. Once again this keeps players from stockpiling materials that could then be used to flood the market at a later date. Putting them into bulk storage would essentially remove them from the economy. Once again it would be best to have this system be account wide, so that you could farm materials on any of your characters and share them for the purpose of crafting. I would absolutely love something like this because I obsessively harvest nodes… but often times have nothing I really need to do with them. I simply stockpile them for that moment I will eventually need them. If I were smart I would simply sell them on the open market, knowing that I could buy them once more if I actually needed them for a project. Instead I dump them in my bank and they take up space. What I envision for an interface is a pretty minimal on, with just each of the crafting materials listed out by category… and a number beside each indicating how many you have in bulk storage. Guild Wars 2 has a similar system that works amazingly well, and seeing something like that in Rift would make my day. Basically having these two systems, combined with the “appearance saving” systems that Rift and Wildstar already have… and World of Warcraft is about to get… would fix almost all of my bag woes.

Evil and Phones

May 6, 2016 by Belghast

Society and Cell Phones

This morning I am going to talk about something that I have been kicking around in my head for awhile, but haven’t really been able to shape into a full fledged commentary. It feels like each week there is some new alarmist piece of media talking about the degradation of society, and placing the blame squarely on the cell phone. For awhile I have had this working theory, that these articles for the most part are written by extroverts, and I am sure for that group of people the landscape has changed in a very scary way. I use my cell phone as a cloaking device, and what I mean by that is I am fiddling with my phone in order to create just enough social friction to convince you that it isn’t worth the time to engage in small talk while standing in the elevator next to you. For years I’ve been frustrated by the fact that apparently standing in the same vicinity as someone is passive consent to be deluged with a bunch of conversation that I have no interest in. Having my smart phone at the ready has greatly cut down on that unwanted interaction, because they see that I am engaged… or at least LOOK like I am engaged. It is the same cloaking device mentality that I apply at work by wearing headphones every single moment I am sitting at my desk. I may not actually be listening to anything, and honestly often times am not. However the act of wearing the headphones stops a lot of “drive by” conversation.

More so than that I feel like access to the internet and social media allows me to engage people safely. I’ve had to learn how to be “normal” but face to face conversation with someone I am not extremely familiar with is a massive anxiety ridden trap. While talking I am actively trying to be normal, running through a checklist of things and constantly aware of how much or how little eye contact I am making. When I am hanging out with someone I am familiar with most of this goes away, and I can just let my guard down. The thing is… non face to face communication lowers all of these barriers for me. I can be a social butterfly in a text only interaction. When I first stepped foot onto IRC back in 1994, it greatly broadened my horizons and introduced me to a world of new people and new places to learn about. So for me, as an introvert… it allows me a certain measure of extrovertedness because it hacks my brain into thinking it is perfectly okay. However for the Extroverts out there… I have a feeling that this does in fact seem like an epidemic. They no longer have all these passive participants that they can forcibly engage in dialog, and instead have to seek out other Extroverts who are equally hungry for that interaction. What I think is happening is that finally introverts are getting a vehicle where they can express themselves more comfortably. I might be wrong, but this is my working theory.

Return of Thorns

The last couple of days has seen me completing my Invoker set for my Crusader, and gathering up most of the items needed for the build I have been working towards. I am just not a fan of the Akkhan’s set and I lacked a handful of the pieces really needed to make it a viable option. A big part of the Season are the Seasonal rewards, and the last major bottleneck for me was the set dungeon for Akkhan. In spite of having tried it numerous times I simply could not stay alive long enough to complete it. However with the Invoker set I was able to muscle through that dungeon and come damned near close to getting “mastery” on my first attempt. The thorns set just feels better to me and as such I have been testing the limits to which I can push it. I am still missing a handful of items, but last night I managed to solo a level 50 Greater Rift without much issue. Earlier in the evening my friend Grace and I who are similarly geared… managed to complete a Greater Rift 60 together. In theory I could probably do the 60 right now solo, but even as a duo there were some pretty sweaty moments. The big problem for me are still a handful of mob types that can straight up one shot me, or come damned close to it. I think that is the sort of thing that only improves with slightly better gear and more paragon levels.

I am still in a constant search for the goblin that drops pets. Some of my friends have found one but so far neither myself nor grace has seen one. Last night we burned through two of the rings that summon the goblin realm thinking that there are three to four goblins in there. However we still had zero luck, but I did fine a cute easter egg. Notice the name of the boss I am fighting in the above image. Essentially right now I need to spend a significant amount of time running Torment X bounties with the hopes of getting the rest of my gem patterns to drop. I think that would go a long ways into improving my overall survival and output, by upgrading to the highest tier of gems available. I am also still in search of the best in slot main hand, and I need to get a shield to throw in the cube. For optimum performance I also need to get another Aquilla chest, because right now I have those reversed with the Aquilla in the cube and the Heart of Iron on my person… when it really should be in the cube. In any case I am just happy that I am functional at Torment X and above. Now begins the long wait to get just the right items to drop when I need them. I also need to start working on the various conquests if I hope to get the extra bank slot for this season. This honestly is a point of frustration for me… I hate that you can ONLY get the slots through conquests. I think that they should sell the extra stash tabs, but also allow players to do the conquest to get one as well. That means if you are doing conquests you are getting the new cap twice as fast.